New Hampshire’s open U.S. Senate seat, created when Sen. Jeanne Shaheen announced her retirement, is drawing candidates from both parties who are putting child care costs and availability near the top of their platforms seven months before the November midterms.
Shaheen, who has served in the Senate since 2009, recently helped child care programs in the Monadnock region secure Northern Border Regional Commission funding before wrapping up a career that stretched back to the state Senate and then the governor’s office starting in 1997. She told the New Hampshire Bulletin she hopes her successor will “continue to think about ways in which to support child care” and “recognize the importance of the early childhood years and how somebody does later in life.”
The candidates vying to replace her include Democrats Chris Pappas and Karishma Manzur, and Republicans John E. Sununu and Scott Brown.
Pappas, who currently represents New Hampshire’s 1st Congressional District in the U.S. House, has been the most visible on the issue so far. On April 3, he toured a Merrimack Valley Day Care facility in Concord and sat down with Democratic state Rep. Mary Jane Wallner of Concord and Executive Director Marianne Barter to hear what child care workers say they need from Washington.
The conversation matters to families across the Upper Valley and the rest of the state.
New Hampshire’s child care shortage isn’t abstract for working parents. Many families in Lebanon, Claremont, and surrounding Grafton County communities spend months on waitlists for licensed care, and providers in rural areas often can’t pay wages competitive enough to keep qualified staff.
Pappas framed the problem in economic terms. “We have a cost-of-living crisis, and we have to figure out how to make things less expensive and ensure that families get what they need,” he said. “And I think about something like child care, which should be an important value from a community perspective, but it also is important to our economy. And by investing in child care, by supporting the child care workforce, we can grow the economic pie in New Hampshire and across the country.”
His campaign has released what he calls a blueprint to support child care workers and expand access to services. He described affordability as a “linchpin of how we create a more affordable economy” for families.
On the Republican side, former U.S. Sen. John E. Sununu, brother of former Gov. Chris Sununu, is seeking his party’s nomination to reclaim the seat. Sununu previously served in the Senate and in the U.S. House before that. His positions on federal child care spending have not been detailed in the same way Pappas’s have at this stage of the race.
Scott Brown is also running for the Republican nomination. Brown, a former U.S. senator from Massachusetts who later represented New Hampshire in a Senate race, hasn’t yet put forward a specific child care platform based on reporting available so far.
What’s clear is that whoever wins will inherit a state where the Child Care Aware of America estimates that full-time infant care costs a New Hampshire family more than $17,000 a year, well above the national median. The New Hampshire Child Care Advisory Council has documented persistent shortages in licensed slots, particularly outside the Seacoast and Manchester areas where rural families have few options and long drives.
Shaheen’s departure closes out a long chapter of federal advocacy for early education funding in a state where child care has long been treated as a private expense rather than a public priority. The candidates who want her seat are beginning to show whether they see that as a problem worth solving at the federal level, and voters in towns from Claremont to Conway will be watching how specific those answers get between now and November.
Written by
Dartmouth Independent StaffContributing writer at The Dartmouth Independent
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